The series follows a former first lady, Elaine Barrish Hammond, played by Sigourney Weaver. (“Even in the pantsuit she’s breathtaking,” the pilot script reads.) After losing the presidential nomination to a younger, inexperienced candidate, Elaine reluctantly signs on as secretary of state. Her popularity skyrockets, and between rounds of high-stakes diplomacy she has hushed conversations with aides about making another White House run.

“I sat very clearly on the Hillary side of the aisle” in the 2008 presidential election, Greg Berlanti, the show’s executive producer, said over coffee at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. He donated $6,900 to Mrs. Clinton’s primary campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And of his latest show he said, “I wrote this in part to prove my point.”

The Clintons have been ripe fodder for fiction, from the 1998 movie “Primary Colors,” based on the roman à clef by Joe Klein, to the 2010 HBO movie “The Special Relationship,” about Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (with Hope Davis as Mrs. Clinton).

Photo

Sigourney Weaver stars in “Political Animals” on USA, in which a former first lady and presidential candidate is secretary of state.Credit
David Giesbrecht/USA

But political dramas have been few and far between on prime-time television, and usually they’ve tried to distance themselves from seeming too rooted in reality. The last hit, Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing,” ended in 2006 and presented a president with vaguely middle-ground positions. Among such shows today, the most successful, “The Good Wife” on CBS, quickly morphed into a legal drama after drawing viewers with an Eliot Spitzer-style scandal. Even in an election year HBO’s “Veep,” about an inept vice president, and ABC’s “Scandal,” about a Washington fixer, haven’t seemed to catch the ratings. With NBC’s “1600 Penn” still to come, it’s unclear whether viewers have an appetite for policy positions and campaign intrigue with a decidedly blue-state tilt, especially from USA, known for its far different fare.

USA is a meat-and-potatoes basic cable channel that is home to lighthearted series like “Burn Notice,” “White Collar” and “Royal Pains.” But it wanted “Political Animals,” to appeal not only to politics fans but also to the hordes of viewers who flock to soapy family dramas. (Think of a Beltway version of ABC’s “Revenge,” in Brooks Brothers suits.)

That edict matched Mr. Berlanti’s sensibilities. As the creator of the WB drama “Everwood,” a writer on “Dawson’s Creek” and a show runner on ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters,” he said that although he found initial inspiration in Mrs. Clinton, the fictional family drama that engulfs the Hammonds interested him more than poll numbers, policy and, well, reality. This is, after all, Hollywood.

“It’s politics as theater,” said Laurence Mark, a film veteran and an executive producer of “Political Animals.” “There’s a stage, and then there’s backstage.”

Mr. Mark was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, and the series grew, in part, out of the debates he and Mr. Berlanti had over dinners in West Hollywood.

During a recent day shooting at soundstages inside a former warehouse in Philadelphia, cast members passed around an article about Mrs. Clinton in The New York Times Magazine. Several parts of it — “Hillary Clinton’s Last Tour as a Rock-Star Diplomat” — read like plot points in “Political Animals.”

“At first I thought our pilot script slipped out,” said James Wolk, who plays Douglas Hammond, one of the Hammonds’ twin sons. “Did they steal our show?”

Mr. Berlanti puts a prominent gay character in each series he writes. In “Political Animals” that’s Douglas’s brother, T. J. Hammond, the first openly gay “first son.” “Everyone kept waiting for his homosexuality to be an issue but, nope, it never was,” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell says in a newscast in the pilot episode.

On a break from shooting Ms. Weaver said she avoided studying Mrs. Clinton. “Some parallels with the Clintons are so direct, I’m happier not knowing them,” she said. “I didn’t want to play Mrs. Clinton.”

Part of the challenge of political dramas is the portrayal of celebrities. Julianne Moore perfected Sarah Palin’s Alaskan lilt in “Game Change,” but too often portrayals drift into imitation. “I wouldn’t have been interested in that kind of quasi-realism,” Ms. Weaver said.

Rather, she said what drew her to her first major television role was exploring the dynamic of a powerful woman in charge at work but in over her head personally. In “Political Animals” Elaine finds herself negotiating a hostage crisis in Iran or telling off a Vladimir Putin-like prime minister (in Russian) while planning her son’s engagement party. Just after Elaine loses the primary, she divorces the womanizing former president, Bud Hammond.

Elaine finds an unlikely ally in the columnist Susan Berg, a Maureen Dowd-like Beltway presence played by Carla Gugino. Susan won a Pulitzer for exposing Bud’s sexual exploits in the White House, putting her at odds then with the first lady.

To prepare for the role, Ms. Weaver said, she read Madeleine Albright’s memoir “Madam Secretary,” studied Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s demeanor, and took inspiration from the mothers at the private school in Manhattan that her daughter, Charlotte, attended. “They’re the ones who rolled up their sleeves and got things done,” Ms. Weaver said.

Mr. Berlanti said he used several first families as inspiration. He read Robert Caro’s biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and said he based Bud Hammond largely on Johnson. Douglas has hints of Bobby Kennedy. And the Hammond family is meant to be as dark and dysfunctional as the Fisher clan in HBO’s “Six Feet Under.”

To capitalize on the current political climate, USA moved fast on the mini-series, which Mr. Berlanti wrote in his spare time as a spec script.

Photo

Martin Sheen in “The West Wing.”Credit
NBC

Warner Brothers, which makes the show, had initially pitched it to HBO and Showtime. After striking out with pay-cable channels, the studio took it to basic cable. USA, looking for something buzzy that would differentiate its summer lineup and bring in new viewers, “went after it with a vengeance,” said Peter Roth, the president of Warner Brothers Television.

The channel skipped the traditional route of commissioning a pilot, then deciding whether to pick the series up, and instead gave Mr. Berlanti six episodes including a 73-minute pilot. If USA renews the series, the second season will have 10 to 12 episodes, Mr. Roth said.

It’s a departure from USA’s strategy of “blue skies” shows that has made it the most-watched basic cable channel of its kind, often beating its broadcast cousin NBC in total viewers. That success allowed USA to expand its image and peg the “Political Animals” budget at nearly $4 million per episode (compared with the $2.5 million of a typical USA show).

In what Mr. Roth called an unprecedented deal, USA provided the money and shooting schedule necessary to secure actresses like Ms. Weaver, Ellen Burstyn and Vanessa Redgrave, who guest stars. Those actresses typically don’t do television, much less a series on a channel that not too long ago was known for wrestling and reruns of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Getting Ms. Weaver to agree to her first television series between shooting movies, including installments of “Avatar,” was in some ways a decades-long process. Jeff Wachtel, a co-president of USA Network, likes to tell the story about how as a junior in college he directed Ms. Weaver in a Yale School of Drama production of “A Delicate Balance” by Edward Albee.

“She never wanted to do TV, but you just stay in touch, and maybe the right thing comes up one day,” Mr. Wachtel said. (Ms. Weaver said Mr. Berlanti’s dishy pilot script attracted her.)

USA won the series in January and rushed for a premiere this summer, when there are fewer scripted competitors and talk of the presidential race is heating up. “By November, based on the attack ads already on TV, we’ll all be a little saturated,” Mr. Wachtel said. “We wanted to be in the heat of the dialogue.”

USA decided to pitch “Political Animals” as a “limited-series television event.” That approach worked for the History channel, which in May drew about 14 million viewers nightly, its largest audience ever, to its “Hatfields & McCoys” mini-series.

“Across TV right now the ‘big events,’ whether it’s sports or three nights of ‘Hatfields & McCoys’ or a six-part ‘Political Animals,’ people want the hot, the new, the event,” said Chris McCumber, USA co-president.

The channel has jumped the shark with mini-series in the past. The 2007 Debra Messing vehicle “Starter Wife” drew big audiences when it began as a limited summer run. It fizzled after being turned into a continuing series. There’s also a chance viewers will have political fatigue. In April CNN recorded its lowest-rated month in 10 years, according to Nielsen.

Mr. Wachtel said that if successful, the show could have the long-term ability to transport a frustrated electorate, the way “The West Wing” gave the nation President Josiah Bartlet during the George W. Bush years. (“Political Animals” uses that show’s Oval Office set. Warner Brothers, which also produced “The West Wing,” shipped it in pieces to Philadelphia from Burbank, Calif.)

“Most people feel unhappy with the political climate, and here comes an alternative way of looking at our culture and our country,” Mr. Wachtel said. But he added: “We can’t get too highfalutin. It’s a TV show.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2012, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Madam Secretary’s Oval Office Ambitions. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe